1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a semiconductor integrated circuit having a plurality of modules able to replace functions of each other, more particularly relates to a semiconductor integrated circuit reducing the drop in yield due to a fault of modules.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent semiconductor integrated circuits are being made increasingly smaller in processing dimensions and larger in size of circuits. The drop in yield due to defects in production has therefore become serious. Therefore, the technique of previously providing redundant circuits at parts of the entire circuit and replacing defective parts by the redundant circuits to thereby prevent an entire semiconductor chip from being discarded as defective is proposed.
For example, in the method of generation of data of a logical circuit of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) described in Japanese Patent No. 3491579, the necessity of circumventing a fault is judged from fault information and logical information, and if necessary, the logical information is changed so as to replace the function of the faulty part with that of a spare part.
Further, in the semiconductor device described in Japanese Patent No. 3192220, data is transferred among a plurality of circuit modules by memory map type addressing. An ID code is assigned to each circuit module, and the ID codes are processed to control the destination of transfer of the data and thereby replace a faulty circuit module by a redundant circuit module.